Recently, famous portal sites on the Internet mostly provide map services. Generally, basic map data for such Internet map services have been produced by portal sites or expert map production agents. Actually, such Internet maps have been produced and served by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Corporation, and so forth, and in Korea, many companies have also produced Internet maps.
At present, the so-called mash-up map information, which is produced by adding additional information onto Internet map data, has been provided. The mash-up map information provides geographic area-related information such as a local advertisement, weather, and a crime ridden area, which are mixed with the map, and also provides useful information in addition to the other local information.
In particular, an advertisement of a company in a specified geographic area is made by exposing the advertisement of the corresponding company on the map, and the issuance of discount coupons, discount event information, and so forth, are additionally provided.
FIG. 1 is a signal flow chart for explaining a conventional map service system.
The conventional map service system includes an advertiser terminal 10, a map service system 20 and a user terminal 30.
An advertiser requests an advertisement to the map service system 20 through the advertiser terminal 30 with geographic location information of a company to be advertised and an exposure time (step S10).
In response to the advertisement request, the map service system 20 prepares an advertisement banner corresponding to the geographic location information (step S20). In response to a request for map data in which the geographic location information is included, a position of the company to be advertised is displayed on the map and the advertisement banner is also displayed beside the map.
For example, if the user terminal 30 requests a map corresponding to a specified geographic area to the map service system 20 (step S30), the map service system 20 provides advertisement information of the geographic area in the form of the advertisement banner together with the map data (step S40).
Meanwhile, when the exposure time set by the advertisement request at step S10 is passed, the advertisement will not be displayed any further. At this time, advertisement costs may be charged before or after the advertisement based on the exposure time (step S50).
FIG. 2 is an example screen showing an advertisement exposure in accordance with the conventional map service system.
As can be seen in FIG. 2, a position of a company to be advertised is displayed on the map of a specified region, and a banner advertisement of the corresponding company is exposed beside the map.
In the banner advertisement, discount coupons and valuation information may be provided in addition to the company information. Also, the company to be advertised may be displayed by filtering search results of the specified geographic area in consideration of information, such as a search keyword, a user interest item, user location information, and so forth.
In accordance with the conventional system, however, an advertisement is charged only based on the exposure time of the advertisement, and thus it is impossible to provide various billing policies of advertisement cost. That is, by using the map data to which only the geographic location information of the company is added, it is impossible to track the advertisement exposure displayed on the map, thereby causing difficulties in employing various billing policies of advertisement cost.
As the billing policies of advertisement cost, a CPC (Cost-Per-Click) method, a CPA (Cost-Per-Action) method, a CPM (Cost-Per-Mile) method, and the like, have been proposed. However, in accordance with the conventional system, such advertisement cost billing policies cannot be applied to the map advertisement service, and thus there is unreasonableness in that the advertiser should pay fixed advertisement charges regardless of whether the advertiser's product or company has been effectively advertised.
Meanwhile, since a map service operator cannot suggest various billing policies of advertisement cost to the advertiser according to an advertisement target, it becomes difficult for the map service operator to activate the map advertisement service.
In addition, in accordance with the conventional map advertisement method as described above, when a user terminal uses a map service, the map service is provided only within the web site of a map service system, and thus viral marketing, which is the advantage of an online service, cannot be used at all.